Noxon, 52, the now healthy and successful co-creator of UnReal,mined her own nearly decade-long battle with eating disorders for her first feature film, about a young woman's battle with anorexia.

Her teenage obsession with measuring the width of her too-skinny arms inspired the tick seen in Ellen (Lily Collins), her real-life doctor informed down-to-earth supporting character Dr. William Beckham (Keanu Reeves), and a hamburger-shaped cake made by her stepmother inspired the inappropriate burger baked good presented by Ellen's stepmother in the film.

Another scene based on Noxon's personal experience? The shocking moment when Ellen is bottle-fed by her mother.

Near the end of the movie, Ellen shows up at her mom's door, frail after running away from a treatment facility. Ellen's mom (Lili Taylor) sets her daughter up in an outdoor yurt and bottle-feeds her as a final attempt at mother-daughter bonding. The sequence is a tearjerker, especially for Noxon.

"(Shooting) the movie, that was the only time I was having trouble holding it together," says Noxon, who also directed To the Bone. "To me it was one of the most painful moments in the movie, because while something like that had happened to me and my mom, I remembered it as the moment I realized she was letting me go."

In Noxon's experience, when she was at a low point in her health, her mother "a hippy-dippy alternative medicine fan," wanted to bottle-feed her on the recommendation of a Sikh.

"We had tried other things and they weren’t really working, and one of the things he recommended in addition to spicy foods and the Essence of Chicken, is she try bottle-feeding me, because clearly some nurturing instinct had gone haywire," Noxon says. "So my mom tried to bottle-feed me, at the time and I was 16. It was incredibly awkward. We never did it again."

It wasn't the bottle-feeding that ultimately helped Noxon (and the semi-autobiographical Ellen) reach a turning point in her recovery. Instead, it was something else Noxon depicts onscreen in a fantastical sequence: an out-of-body experience.

"I kinda left my body one time. It’s a crazy story," Noxon says. "I was hovering over my bed and I saw myself. And I could see that I needed help. It was the only time that I had compassion for that body. I was like, 'Somebody has to help her.' I was on the brink. I had had palpitations that day. I was very ill and the next thing I knew I was on a tunnel, heading toward a light, and I had this kind of awareness that it wasn’t my time. I chose to come back."